A networked storage system may include a number of storage appliances. A storage appliance may provide services related to the organization of data on mass storage devices, such as disks. Some of these storage appliances are commonly referred to as filers or file servers. An example of such a storage appliance is any of the Filer products made by Network Appliance, Inc. in Sunnyvale, Calif. The storage appliance may be implemented with a special-purpose computer or a general-purpose computer programmed in a particular way. Depending on the application, various networked storage systems may include different numbers of storage appliances.
Networked storage systems have been widely deployed to store sensitive or confidential information for various users, such as government agencies. To prevent hacking or breaking into networked storage systems, these users take great care in safeguarding system environment-related information, such as configuration information of the storage appliances within the system, hostnames and Internet Protocol (IP) addresses of the storage appliances.
Conventionally, storage appliances generate autosupport data, which is information related to the configuration and/or operation of the storage appliances. Thus, autosupport data may include system environment related information of the storage appliances. Vendors of the storage appliances often use the autosupport data to service and/or debug problems in the storage appliances. Because of the sensitive nature of certain system environment related information, some users choose not to send the autosupport data to vendors for service because of security concerns. As a result, when problems arise in these users' storage appliances, vendors do not have the relevant autosupport data and have limited ability to support these users.